Scene #9340:

Owner	Pose
Lilian Rook	Oreshnika makes 'a sleepover' sound so simple; and in a strange way, it actually is. It's a weirdly cozy little mockup of a Japanese-style mansion that you've been to before, bigger on the inside in a way that's now more convenient than unfamiliar, located on the sunny coast of a forgotten part of Japan (even though you only know because you were told), and the colossal wall of fog, miles away and straight up in every direction, actually just makes the weather strangely pleasant. You may be in a top secret location that's funded by Lilian and protected by Tamamo and which contains a sliver of a mountaintop from the Urals simply blended into the valley gradient between the two crescent cliffs, and two people who live here (and one who visits) may be of literally cosmic importance somehow, and sure there's allegedly an underwater passage to the legendary palace of the dragon king which nobody has checked; and sure there's no normal internet, the appliances are all over the place, there's no corner store, the buildings are weirdly restored from the 20th century's own restorations of the 19th, English is everyone's second language at best, it's probably still kinda haunted, and there's a good chance at least one Antegent is within ten miles of you, but all said and done, you're . . . Literally just going to a friend's house? You've been there before. You hang out all the time online. You even vaguely recognize the door guards, because there's only like eight guards in total and they all dress like gacha lads from the !Japan expansion now. A villager from the mountains says hi. You can hear the thump-thump-thump of Nika running to the door in her socks from the other side. An enterprising soul has managed to convince her to wear jean shorts in addition to her giant t-shirt, and probably brushed her hair. You'd basically forgotten about the water clock, but the sound is instantly familiar. The cute little courtyard that doesn't exist from the outside is still in the same season. "Did you bring pajamas? Did you bring a toothbrush? Did you bring a sleeping bag? You don't have to bring a sleeping bag. There's beds. We can put all the mattresses on the floor together. I already did just in case you want to. Did you bring your DS? You definitely did right? And you brought outside snacks right? You have to! It's like the opposite of a movie theatre. It's a ¶tithe/ritual/half-ass¶ right?" You're being dragged along the entire time you're bombarded with the entire question queue. Nika has apparently learned to navigate the barrage of extradimensional sliding doors with perfect efficiency, because it's barely any time at all before you pass through a villa-style dining room and drop straight into a room utterly colonized by beanbag chairs and CRTs with grip-strips at each step in and out.
Petra Soroka	At some point, Petra starts to feel more out of place if going to a friend's house doesn't involve passing through a towering wall of magical fog that cocoons a privately cultivated and mystically alien oasis from the rest of the teemingly unwelcome world. The Library, here-- Lilian's place counts too, and even Hydrochoeria is often surrounded by cloud vapor, though it's not quite the same thing. That it's become sort of a theme, that the places the girls Petra preferentially spends time with are all most comfortable in magically carved-out worlds of their own, speaks a lot to the kind of company Petra wants, and her goals with Hydrochoeria. The types of girls Petra wants to be 'us' with are the types who need an environment like this, so it's her duty to make Hydrochoeria as much of a similar sanctuary as possible. So, it is just going to a friend's house. Every friend of Petra's has cosmic importance. If not naturally, then Petra manifests it for them. Over the two and a half years since she first met Oreshnika, Petra's gone from gawkingly naive about anything stranger than a suburban 2.5 bath home, to feeling like her skin would shudder off her body if she ever stepped into one again. So, blissfully cheerful, she just sweeps through the Dragon's Garden with the ease of an obscure extended family member, happy to introduce herself or wave to the scattered few who recognize her; belonging by nature inalienable, even if the location itself isn't overly familiar. Petra can't keep the smile off her face at the sound of Nika's footsteps, even before she opens the door. In lieu of a backpack (sure she could bring one, but this is cooler) Petra has her Stigma Office guitar case slung across her back, with a simple graphic tee with a gold pattern on it and jeans. Of course, it'd be terrible optics to show up to the Dragon's Garden without Lilian's collar on for Petra, but she does fiddle with the flower ornament with a little bit of discomfort while waiting for Nika, recalling a teary breakdown in Audrey's dorm room, only a couple months ago. That brief frown is gone by the time Nika throws the door open, replaced with a beaming hug and an excited bounce in her step as she follows behind Nika through the building. "Yup! Yup! I did, just in case, but I've actually always got one on me because of how often I sleep outside, so the mattresses are good. And I've got my DS, plenty of snacks, and a new visual novel, and I've got a new attachment for Ruble that I think you'll like."
Petra Soroka	The ritual, in this case, isn't just that Petra actually brought all of those things. That's the sleepover ritual, which is important, of course, but all of those questions could be implicitly answered in just another minute when they sit down and Petra actually pulls all of those things out of her guitar case. But with Nika's habit of rapidfire questions and the threat of some of them getting passed over in the torrent, their pictochat conversations now regularly involve a hand-drawn 'reply' type feature from Petra, and the ritual of responding-in-order carries over to reality. Maybe if it was anyone else, Petra would find it annoyingly tedious and cringe, but without the spectre of 'cringe' hanging over her, it's actually a pleasant and soothing way to interact with a person that comes naturally to her. Petra flops down onto one of the beanbag chairs stomach-down, and then shimmies her way out of the guitar strap so that she doesn't accidentally strangle herself. It's still a relatively new object to come into her possession, but the dings and scrapes of everyday Petra activities have started to accumulate on it, and more importantly: stickers of various designs and sizes, arranged to imply that there will eventually be many more. From there, Petra sits up and flips open the case-- asiding that "This case actually has some space-squishy stuff going on with it too, if you wanna say hi,"-- to pile out the snacks around herself and Nika. "Do you think Sakura's gonna join us, too?"
Lilian Rook	Whatever Nika thinks about Petra's collar and whatever Sakura thinks about it are probably very different. The former only gives it a pleasant kind of glance, then moves back to watching Petra's mouth while she talks, beaming. "Oh that makes sense! I thought you probably liked camping a lot because of how often you're ¶outside¶. Arman used to sleep in one before he moved away because the bed was too small but I never tried it. I got something for Ruble too! ¶He/it¶ works so hard I thought it would be good even if it's kind of silly." The chairs are surprisingly firm for how often they're probably used and how old they likely are; like they've never managed to degrade past the point of 'comfortably broken in'. Nika skips away while you're unloading your gear, though she doesn't go far, returning quickly with little Ruble nestled in the bowl of what must have once been the stump of a prematurely felled tree, ostensibly carved out by hand and filled from edge to edge with diorama quality handicrafts along the lines of Nika's idea of 'a mouse house', though a loose nest like an actual rat's is on top of a charging port instead of a quaint little human bed. For whatever reason, little green buds have grown on the side of the thoroughly whittled down stump-bowl, which she proudly sets down on the central table at kneeling height, and throws her arms up in silent 'tada!', then using them to balance as she idly spins around on one foot. "Space-squishy just makes me think of space like ¶four-dimensional superfluid/goopy goop goo¶, haha! If I ever get to travel, I really want something like that. I'm really bad at packing. I tried to do it a few times when I was trying to run away, but I never got to pack everything I needed into something I could carry. Do you think it's on purpose that they don't make bags big enough to carry ¶a village¶?" Your question about Sakura answers itself. Nika realizes a few seconds in advance, and spins herself into a beanbag flop; apparently out of habit more than just excess of energy, like sitting normally would be too understimulating. The sound of footsteps from the hall behind you catches up to you a second later, and then it is thus proven that Sakura, despite appearances*, can open and close screen doors and her own. She isn't much louder for being in the room than outside of it. Dipping her head at you feels almost absurd, given she's already less than five feet tall, and has the side effect of obscuring her pale and tired look for a moment longer. "There you are, Petra! It's a pleasure as always." "Was it always?" "No. But it will always be from now on." "Oh, that makes sense." "Do you mind if I . . . ?" "I keep saying you don't have to ask! It's your house! Just the blue one is mine. I thought about doing it backwards and saying the pink one is yours but that seemed kinda . . ." "Hm?" "¶weirdly specific/loaded/uncomfortable¶ I guess." "Hah . . . Sorry, I'll try to get over the habit." "Were you at work? You look like you were at work. I can go turn the music on. I'm gonna light some candles and stuff too. Was it okay today? It doesn't seem like it was too ¶strenuous/novel/harrowing¶. I've been trying to tell just by looking." "I was, and it wasn't, and that'd be wonderful, and you're so sweet." "That's great! It'd suck if you were too tired on the day Petra comes over!"
Lilian Rook	Seating herself on the third side of the table, Sakura looks over to you while Nika jumps right back up, scurrying around to a miraculously functional turn of the century boombox and switching on a tape that appears to be soft nature sounds, running water, and almost subliminally quiet low-tempo music; as well as lighting what are incense sticks and not candles by 'saying', ¶Fire for but the sake of light¶ ¶We've got the air inside just right¶ Leaning her face into her hands, she looks you up and down more thoroughly than Nika did, as though doing so were both a formality and also something viscerally refreshing. As Nika dives behind the main cabinet to start rearranging composite AV cables, she says "You look well. Does it ever spook you at all? You used to need to always be ill."
Petra Soroka	"I thought you probably liked camping a lot because of how often you're ¶outside¶." "Mhm, mhm. Though actually, I don't even use a sleeping bag most of the time, since if I'm sleeping fully outside, then I just sleep in the Beauty of Ash. You know, the friend I told you about." While Petra had access to plenty of different ways to send an actual picture of the Beauty of Ash to Nika, it'd never felt particularly relevant compared to the crude thick-lined pictochat sketches of it she'd made to explain it to her. It's important to consider the audience in these kinds of things, and while a photo might be more accurate to how the mech looks, Petra figured the clumsy animal-like angular shapes of the drawing conveyed it better to Nika specifically. Though, she could totally show her the mech in person sometime over the course of the night. "Now I'm usually sleeping inside in Hydrochoeria, though-- oh, oh, and that's the thing I wanted to show you, once you're back with him." Petra gasps and claps her hands together at the sight of Ruble's bowl. "Oh my god, you made him a house. That's adorable; I love it. You know, I've built a lot of those guys, and they've all got such different houses at this point. One of them, Drachma, I gave to a friend of mine who's a robot, and she grew a little bowl-like..." Petra tries to mime the shape with her hands. "Bucket thing on her head for him to stay in." "It's not really like they share a network or anything, but I like that there's so many... 'diverging paths' for them. Like they're all little alternate universe versions of each other." "If I ever get to travel, I really want something like that." Petra rolls off the beanbag chair and clambers up to her feet to fish something else out of the guitar case, a small technological attachment that is, for stylistic reasons that just happen to also be practical, shaped like a chunk of swiss cheese. Shutting the guitar case temporarily and observing the pile of treats around it for a moment, Petra hesitates before making a decision that she probably won't end up regretting. "You know, I have a friend who can make these kinds of things. If you travel, maybe she'd be able to get you something like it. She could probably let you pack anything short of the village, and... well, the village's already been picked up and moved before, and if it happened again I might get in trouble, haha." When Sakura comes in, Petra is affixing her cheese-themed tech to the bottom of Ruble's belly, with little projector lenses inside the cheese holes glinting in the light. With the click of a button, Ruble floats up into the air and projects downwards onto the table a holographic map of Hydrochoeria. It's filtered to be slightly more cartoonish than in reality, and there's necessarily a lot of differences from in the actual game due to the limitations of it, but it's immediately recognizable as being a real world manifestation of the island village she and Nika built together. "--There. See, I didn't really know how else to build up Hydrochoeria, but I needed to house-- oh, Sakura, hey!" Petra straightens up and awkwardly dusts off her shirt, like she can smooth out the wrinkles from having basically just been rolling around on the ground a minute ago. Sakura is someone Petra still feels like she needs to make a 'good impression' on, in the efforts to get to know her better. Of course, by nature of her position near Lilian, she's ontologically trustworthy beyond fault and Petra's had nothing but positive and mildly humiliating interactions with her, but that just means Petra has to double down on being Good.
Petra Soroka	"But it will always be from now on." Petra closes her eyes and lets out a long sigh. Vaguely, it calls to mind the thought of the meltdown she was remembering earlier, and the permanance of arcs, and the impermanence and untrustworthiness of Petra, but she just holds onto those feelings in her head for a few seconds before placing them to the side. She settles down with her legs crossed on top of the beanbag, simultaneously precariously balanced and comfortable, hands on her ankles to lean forwards. "So, uh... what do you do for work?" Petra immediately winces. Losercore lame ass small talk question. However, she actually has no idea, and so she must forge onwards bravely past the lameness in order to establish the necessary C-rank social bond that expands her options. "You do kind of look tired, do you..." ALERT: Petra is inside Sakura's house. She has just returned from work and appears drained. What do you do in this situation? >Well, what was it like with Lilian? There's a moderate overlap in the days when Lilian is stressed from bullshit paperwork or conferences with the Paladins, and days when Petra would be summoned over to her house. Of course, Lilian and Sakura have very different temperaments, but these days would also have frequent repetitions of Lilian telling Petra to shut up. >Isn't that just because everything you say is stupid? Well, maybe. But Petra also has a habit of talking loudly, and as Lilian has gone at length about before, her voice is 'whiny, grating, irritating', and so on. It's sort of like talking loudly at someone who has a hangover. And thus she has her answer. After five entire seconds of her eyes glazing over while she thinks. "... Need me to keep my voice down?" "You used to need to always be ill." Petra puffs out some air like she's been lightly punched in the stomach, and thoughtlessly brushes a thumb across the interior of her wrist. "I... well, I don't know. It's an 'arc' where I feel... healthier, so far, but... I don't know how long it'll last. It's sort of a recent development, for me to not be ill, so..." Petra looks down at the table with the hologram, averting her gaze. "It's hard for me to put the right words to it. But I guess, right now, Lilian's given me the job of being less ill all the time, so I'm trying that out."
Lilian Rook	Nika doesn't deviate in her attention all that much at just the Beauty of Ash's name, but whe you reiterate the relationship-- the friend-- she is struck pensive with something. She doesn't voice it immediately. She isn't the type. It'll probably cook for a while. She ends up lost on what you try to make her next, alerting at the word 'him' and looking in the direction of Ruble, then somewhere out the window. Your reaction to the former delights her; not in a childish or superficial way, but easily readable as the relief followed by endorphin rush of someone who wasn't sure it would go over well but put a lot of work into it. "I think it's important." she says, where it might have been safer to frame it as a question. "¶All things of Heaven and Earth¶ has a place it's supposed to be. ¶It/we¶ will find one even if we don't think about it. If you don't think about it, then it might end up like the usual corner of the desk or a dusty closet you forgot." "So it's really important to give special things ¶houses/homes¶ on purpose. Even people can get really ¶sick/diminished/deep in the hole¶ if they get settled into one that isn't on purpose. So I think lots of homes for all of them is like you, because you're in lots of places on purpose." Nika stops to breathe, rolls her eyes up and to the side to recall from memory the words she'd just said, closes them, and nods in satisfaction. Checklist clear. She catches sight of the swiss-cheese greeble on her way back from fiddling with cables, and is drawn into rapt attention. Attachable doohickeys that give cool upgrades are just from games and old movies in her life, at least, so it's novel. "I think I wanna travel soon. I'd want to visit my ¶pen-pal/hometown¶ first." Her train of thought deflects dramatically when she sees the holographic island. Jumping up, back to get a good angle, then slowly circling the table to see it from all sides, Nika adds ever so smoothly, "But maybe if it was somewhere else, Lilian and Sakura wouldn't keep saying it's too dangerous. I'm not mad about it or anything though. It probably totally is. I don't want to get in fights like you do." Sakura catches your sigh, though. In a way, it's almost like having to put up with what everyone else does around mind-readers. She's no doubt seen so much of your life, and inferred more than should be normal, that there's no real doubt she's at least close to the mark when she says, "If you don't say things out loud every so often, whether it's how you feel or what someone else means to you . . . Well, you've made lots of promises, so that's mine. That it'll always be good to see you." Her smile at your question is a little bit like a wince, but the braced melancholy in her gaze tells you that she'd expecting the question as soon as Nika asked in front of you. "It's nothing so respectable as a job." she says, with a particular kind of double-feint sarcasm, mild and soft enough you could almost miss it. "I just do the things that only I can do for Saeko and the others. Nobody makes me do anything, if you're wondering, but it does take a lot out of me." She holds a sleeve in front of her mouth when she laughs, but it isn't very loud. "No, no, it's nothing like that. Hearing someone else talk about things helps, actually. You could say it's part of why my days have improved so much since Miss Mika, ah, 'moved in'."
Lilian Rook	While Nika is still closely examining the hologram, Sakura settles a little deeper into her beanbag chair, loosening her neck and stretching her back in a way that her layers of clothes downplay the 'office lady'-ness of it, and staring close-eyed at the ceiling, she rolls her head partway towards you, and says, "Do you want it to last? Thinking about it in a fatalistic way is no good, you know. Even if people are somewhat predictable, everything still happens because of people; 'things' having 'qualities' is part of life's illusion." Suitably impressed with Ruble's new gear, Nika slides over to ask, "Can he show other kinds of things too? Can I show you things? Oh, do you want the end or middle mattress? Lilian just got us new controllers too, so you can pick!" Sakura laughs silently. "Though, I didn't mind keeping the old ones from wearing out. It's easy when they're treated with love." She opens her eyes to watch Nika. You can see her expectant gaze wavering on waiting for an opportunity when her back is turned again, but Nika is fully engaged with her too, and so Sakura only breaks their Canadian standoff with a rueful, self-directed smile. "Did you have fun with Ash? I'm quite surprised at how everything went. I've 'known' them for a long time, and never seen anything like that. It's been nice, getting to see another side of an 'old friend' you still haven't met. Nowadays, I have something else to look forward to checking on each day." Nika, far from being shocked, confused, smiles and says "I'm jealous. Is that okay to say? The others probably are too though. Since that's 'something only you can do' like Sakura talks about. Does it make you feel important?"